African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance

The African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, formerly the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), is a United States program to train military trainers and equip African national militaries to conduct peace support operations and humanitarian relief.

The ACOTA program, which succeeded ACRI in 2004, aims to increase the capabilities of African military forces in areas such as human rights, interaction with civil society, international law, military staff skills, and small unit operations. Over 40,000 African soldiers will be trained in peacekeeping over five years. The African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program has a record of supporting African military forces that have afterwards participated in peacekeeping or peace support activities in the continent. The program is funded by the US Department of State peacekeeping operations account.

Mass murder and genocide have linked historically to the Belgian colonial occupation of the Congo in the 1890 during which ten million people were massacred as part of the initiative of pacification. The controlling European powers that had defined their mission as the civilization of "uncivilized" peoples; elimination of slavery; redemption of souls through religious conversion and expansion of international commerce maintained that the main conflicts in the region were due to tribal hostility.

The genocide and mass murder committed in the Congo paved the road for a century of mass slaughter throughout Africa, with the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in the German protectorate of Namibia serving as the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust during the second world war, in which the Nazis' annihilation of six million European Jews finally brought the issue of genocide to the fore front of international attention.

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